Monday, May 28, 2012

The First Rule of Attachment Parenting is: You Do Not Talk About Attachment Parenting

Welcome to the I Am Mom! Enough! Carnival hosted by Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama and Mandy at Living Peacefully with Children.
This Carnival is dedicated to empowering ALL parents who practice and promote and peaceful, loving, attachment parenting philosophy. We have asked other parents to help us show the critics and the naysayers that attachment parenting is beautiful, uplifting, and unbelievably beneficial and NORMAL!In addition to the Carnival, Joni from Tales of a Kitchen Witch and Jennifer from True Confessions of a Real Mommy are co-hosting a Linky Party. Please stop by either blog to share any of your posts on the topic.
Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants. Post topics are wide and varied, and every one is worth a read.

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"It was on the tip of everyone's tongue...[Dr. Sears] just gave it a name."- Chuck Palahniuk

Attachment Parenting has been around since the dawn of time, people. Until THE BOOK came out, it was just called "the way we parent" or "the way I was raised" or it was called nothing at all. Parents followed their instincts, read their babies (instead of books) and no one found any of it odd...

And then something happened. Parents suddenly needed to listen to experts (real or imagined), and read lots and lots of books and do things exactly as the book (or expert) spelled it out. We all got sucked into the IKEA nesting instinct (if anything happens, we have that carrier thing COVERED)

But rules...guidelines...they can say anything. They can be anything. They're like art - once the artist lets go, the viewer sees only themselves. So what if we change the rules? What if we take these 8 guidelines of AP:

1. You do not talk about [Attachment Parenting]
2. You DO NOT TALK ABOUT [ATTACHMENT PARENTING]
3. Someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over
4. Only two guys to a fight
5. One fight at a time, fellas
6. No shirt, no shoes
7. Fights will go on as long as they have to
8. If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.

And then we'll talk about how THOSE look in our family:

1. You do not talk about Attachment Parenting: Seriously. You don't talk about it because this is what you get: When are you getting him out of your room? When are you weaning? You don't need to wear him, just put him in the cart/stroller/swing/bouncy seat/bucket. Do you need to go to the bathroom to feed him? What kind of hippie freak are you, letting him pee in your compost heap???? (that last one has nothing to do with AP, but you get my point - you open that door and people will walk through it and use their sanctimony as a door stop to keep it open.) Best to just do your thing and nip all commentary in the bud.

2. You DO NOT TALK ABOUT ATTACHMENT PARENTING: Seriously. Otherwise you'll end up on the cover of TIME magazine having your life twisted and getting hate mail. Or you'll be compelled to leave facebook because the rest of the world has missed the part where you're an actual human being and not an emotionless robot/sociopath.

3. Someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over: If an adult expresses emotions that indicate they have a genuine need, you respond accordingly. If your partner/sibling/bff/colleague/whatever told you that he needed a break or privacy or a shoulder or an ear or a sandwich or stitches...you provide those things in the best way you can. (A caveat here being if you don't give a rat's pinky toe about your relationship, at which point - sabotage away.)

4. Only two guys to a fight: Who's parenting, here? You? Your parents? Your neighbor? Too many signals = confusion. Let the parents parent. If you are not the parent/designated caregiver, your job is to be supportive and refrain from passing judgment. Unless it's complimentary. Praise is always welcome. As is babysitting.

5. One fight at a time, fellas: Babies are like computers - they operate within a finite set of parameters. When Baz was tiny and crying, Husband would set about debugging: diaper, temperature, sleepy, hungry...babies are so small that they (like fairies) can only feel one thing at a time and it overwhelms them: that is why their cries are all-consuming, as are their coos and giggles. Focus on what's happening right now and let the rest happen as it comes.

6. No shirt, no shoes: Amusingly, our rule has always been No Shoes For Nursing (now called Milk-n-Snuggle)...it will be your rule, too, when you get beaned in the eye by someone's foot while they're dancing at the watering hole, as it were. As for public watering...my advice is to be discreet and use those shoes to throw at anyone who gives you the side-eye for feeding your kid. (And by "be discreet" I mean "don't strip" and "invest in cute nursing tops and necklaces so you feel a little more put together and people will focus on that and not the slurping, squirmy, happy baby who is covering up your 'exposed' boob with his giant noggin.")

7. Fights will go on as long as they have to: It takes as long as it takes. "When do you think he'll sleep through the night?" "When will he start crawling/walking/dancing/singing/speaking/making a decent sandwich?" When it happens. And when your child is an adult, no one will care that she walked at 9 months, or didn't walk until 15 months, or that she spoke her first complex sentence at 18 months, or not at all until she was 4 or 5 years old. It takes as long as it takes, and then - just in time- it happens.

8. If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight: You will find yourself, from time to time, defending your choices as a parent (person). Whether they were choices you made consciously or accidentally, whether they worked or didn't work, whether you stuck with them or abandoned them, you will come upon someone who tells you you're wrong, you're an idiot, someone should call CPS on you. You will also have times when you think someone else is wrong, that your way is better, that if they would just OPEN THEIR EYES they would see that the magical solution is right in front of them in the form of what you know better about their family. Hackles will rise, resources will be flung about, names invoked. It will happen. On the internet, at the grocery store, in the park. You will get sucked in and then wonder, later, how it all got tangled up and how you failed to unwind before it all went shockingly awry. Regardless of whether common ground is stood upon, you will think back and wonder how you could have done better. (And honestly - this could happen with your own child, who is searching for their own autonomy...their own identity.) But the reality is that you have to debate. When it's done well, a good debate can spark reflection upon your choices. It can alter your approach, or ground you further in your own truth.

After all, how much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?

I will leave you with two little videos - the first is fully safe for work, if you have the kind of work where you can read blogs and watch youtube. The second has some language, so be aware.

All of this to illustrate that you can pull anything out of context and make it be what you want -from a movie about men finding their own primal support to an article about mother's nursing their children past the modern conventional "acceptable" age.

"You have to give it to him: he had a plan. And it started to make sense, in a [Dr. Sears] sort of way. No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide....In [Dr. Sears] we trusted..." - Chuck Palahniuk

Attachment Parenting Assumptions — ANonyMous at Radical Ramblings argues that attachment parenting is not just for the affluent middle-classes, and that as parents we all need to stop worrying about our differences and start supporting each other.

We ALL Are Mom Enough — Amy W. of Amy Willa: Me, Mothering, and Making It All Work thinks that all mothers should walk together through parenthood and explores her feelings in prose.

A Typical Day Kat at Loving {Almost} Every Moment shares what a typical day with her attached family looks like...all in the hopes to shed light on what Attachment Parenting is, what it's not and that it's unique within each family!

Mom, I am. — Amy at Anktangle discusses how Attachment Parenting is a natural extension of who she is, and she explains the ways her parenting approach follows the "live and let live" philosophy, similar to her beliefs about many other areas of life.

I Am Dad Enough! — Attachment parenting does not only have to be about moms; their partners are just as important. In Code Name: Mama's family, Dionna's husband, Tom, is papa enough for lots of things.

6 comments:

"If an adult expresses emotions that indicate they have a genuine need, you respond accordingly. If your partner/sibling/bff/colleague/whatever told you that he needed a break or privacy or a shoulder or an ear or a sandwich or stitches...you provide those things in the best way you can."

And so we should with our kids! This is such a great point - if we would show respect/consideration for an adult, why not do the same for a child?!Awesome post, Emily :)

As a child psychologist and a mom, one of the things that is so misleading about attachment parenting is the name. It is only called attachment parenting because of the theory it was based upon. It is not called this because it is the only form of parenting which allows parents to develop a secure attachment relationship with their children. There are numerous ways to develop a secure attachment relationship with our kids. I explore more of this myth here for anyone who is interested: http://www.themommypsychologist.com/2012/04/15/what-does-the-mommy-psychologist-have-to-say-about-attachment-parenting/

This post is seriously awesome! Sometimes I just shake my head over all the fancy terms and philosophies that we all clamor to digest and relate to when it comes to parenting. Back in the day when I was little my parents simply parented me. Life has apparently gotten far too complex for instincts. Anyway, I love this: 4. Only two guys to a fight: Who's parenting, here? You? Your parents? Your neighbor? Too many signals = confusion. Let the parents parent. If you are not the parent/designated caregiver, your job is to be supportive and refrain from passing judgment. Unless it's complimentary. Praise is always welcome. As is babysitting.

Thanks for being a part of this Carnival! Your post is an important viewpoint to share!